You’re seeing this preamble because you’re ‘reblogging’. As the creating author of this post, I ask that you please respect my copyrights. How, you ask? In the following manner:

1) keep the title I gave this post;

2) display my name, Ryl Mandus, as its author; and

3) create a functioning link-back to the originating post on this blog,

By all means, quote me if you need to. Someday I may be in the position to return the favor.

Good writing,

— Ryl

No matter what religious sycophants may say [or yell], no one book has all the answers for any one human being.

There’s no such thing as a manual for life. It’s up to each of us to blindly grope through the morass of personal issues along an individual time-line.

In blog discussions with other voracious readers, a few have voiced as intense a dissatisfaction with Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces as they have with Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey. Why the unhappiness? They’re studies, not manuals.

Satisfaction with what you find is slavishly relevant to what you’re seeking, and why you’re seeking it. If you’re looking for a safe step-by-step guide on how to live your own life with all successes guaranteed, you’re not going find one. Risk is inherent. Risk is unavoidable.

Your life is exactly that — your life. It hasn’t been written, yet. You’re the only one who can do that. You’re the only one qualified for the task.

Still looking for instructions on how to live your life? It’s a just like a buffet:

“Life is a banquet, and most poor bastards are starving to death!” ~~ Mame

They’re starving, not because they can’t get to the table, but because they’re petrified by uncertainty. You’ve got to try some of this, try a little of that, taste it, sample it, see how well it goes down or doesn’t. Experiment and learn — the hard way is really the only way — what does and doesn’t work for you.

Some of the world’s greatest discoveries were made entirely by pure chance — gravity, for one example, penicillin, for another. Whatever you stumble upon, recognize it as a possibility, before you dismiss it off-hand.

“I never make stupid mistakes. Only very, very clever ones.” ~~ John Peel